I wouldn't be a true Minnesotan if I didn't repost this documentary about the making of this movie. You betcha.

The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, winning two for Best
Original Screenplay for the Coens and Best Actress in a Leading Role for
McDormand. It also won the BAFTA Award and the Award for Best Director
for Joel Coen at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006 it was
deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and
inducted into the United States National Film Registry. It is currently
the most recently made feature length film in the Registry."

The lamp is a glass jar full of all the things that my mom found in
my pockets when doing my laundry as a child. I was born in 1986, and you
can tell from a lot of the items in it.

It started off with mostly sticks, rocks, and marbles. But over time
it ended up having all sorts of items ranging from Pogs, a Gameboy game
(Super Mario Land), a Magic School Bus McDonald's toy, yo-yos, and Laser
Quest scorecards. There are also plenty of sticks, springs,
rubber-bands, and twist-ties because I went through a phase where I
remember telling my parents I was going to build a robot with just those
items.

I will admit that there are a few items in there from my early 20s
too, as like any lazy college student, I let my mom wash my clothes
while staying at home from college between semesters. And clearly, my
mom was still collecting my things.

Growing up, whenever I left something in my pockets and put them in
the dirty laundry, before she would wash things, she checked my pockets,
and if she found anything, she put it in a glass jar on the top shelf
in the laundry room. I remember as a kid, wishing soooo hard that I
could get some of the items back, but it was forbidden to even go near
the jar.

By the time I was old enough to be sneaky about it and get into
it, I had just learned to accept that that was how it worked and I
wouldn't get those things back.

Years went by and I had completely forgotten about it, until this
last May. I got married, and at our rehearsal dinner, when my mom and
dad stood up to give their thank you speech, my mom pulled a large gift
bag out from under the table. She started by giving a short speech
explaining that over the years she had collected stuff from my pockets,
and it was in that moment that I thought, "I'm gonna get the jar!" I
started tearing up before she had finished talking. When she did, I
opened the bag and found that not only was I getting the jar, I was
getting it back in the form of a lamp (and yes, she has sealed the top
of the lamp to it so that I still CANNOT open it).

This has definitely been the best gift I've ever received.

What a wonderful and thoughtful personalized gift. Closeup photos here.

Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each colour
corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for
Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for America
(North and South considered as a single continent); this was removed
because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it...

Here's the cited 1951 reference*:

We probably will never know for certain whether Coubertin's committee intentionally chose "yellow for Asia, black for Africa" (and red for the Americas) and that position was later "walked back" when such stereotyping became less popular, or whether the attributions of ring color to regions were just a creation of some enterprising writer or reporter.

When trekking through a forest in French Guiana to study termites, a
group of biologists noticed unique spots of blue on the backs of the
insects in one
nest [see lower termite in the embedded photo]. Curious, one scientist reached down to pick up one of these
termites with a pair of forceps. It exploded. The blue spots, the team
discovered,
contain explosive crystals, and they're found only on the backs of
the oldest termites in the colony. The aged termites carry out suicide
missions on
behalf of their nest mates...

Back in their labs, scientists led by biochemist Robert Hanus of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague went on to show that
the blue
termites always had shorter, worn-down mandibles than others from
the same species, indicating that they were older. Then, the researchers
removed the
contents of the blue pouches and analyzed them. They contained a
novel protein that is unusually rich with copper, suggesting that it's
an oxygen
binding-protein. Rather than being toxic itself, it likely is an
enzyme that converts a nontoxic protein into something toxic.

"What happens is when the termites explode, the contents of the back
pouch actually interact with secretions from the salivary gland and the
mixture is
what is toxic," explains Hanus. It's the first time two interacting
chemicals have been shown responsible for a defense mechanism in
termites..."

From the context of the article, my interpretation is that the "exploding" referred to is not an expansive force, but rather a "rupturing" of the termite.

Thirty years ago, a farmer found a few Iron Age silver coins while
working on his land in the island of Jersey, off the coast of Normandy.
Now, after combing the soil with metal detectors for three decades, two
treasure hunters have found a hoard of silver and gold coins, the
biggest of its kind, valued at $15 million.

The treasure was inside a large block of clay. It contains 30,000 to
50,000 silver and gold Celtic coins dating from the 1st Century BC. The
coins—which could have been buried to prevent Roman troops from getting
them during Julius Caesar's invasion of the British Islands—come from
Armorica. They have been buried for more than 2,000 years. According to
numismatic experts, each coin is worth 100 to 200 British Pounds ($156
to $311).

Most of the hoards found in Jersey have been coins from the Coriosolite
tribe, a Celtic tribe from what is now Brittany on the northwestern
coast of France. First century B.C. hoards are the most common because
the populations were under pressure from Julius Caesar’s legions. Caesar
describes his encounters with the coastal tribes of the area he called
Armorica in The Gallic Wars...

...the Veneti, the most prominent of the Armorican tribes, along with their
Armorican neighbors captured some of Caesar’s officers to exchange them
for hostages the Romans had taken... When they fled to the sea, Caesar had his troops build ships, but
they couldn’t compete with the locals’ heavy navy and sailing expertise
in the treacherous waters of the Channel and Atlantic.

He did it in the end, though. He destroyed the Veneti fleet using
giant billhooks to sever the lines used to hoist the mainsails. With the
sails on the deck, the Celtic ships were entirely out of commission.
They couldn’t even row because the huge sails cloaked the deck. Caesar
then went from coastal town to coastal town and killed everyone...

When large institutional investors are fearful, they move money into U.S. Treasuries, driving down the yield on those instruments. This past week, the yield on the 10-year treasuries reached an all-time low:

Investors afraid the European Union might unravel, after Spanish bond
yields spiked and talk of a Greek exit returned to the table, fled for
the apparent safety of U.S. government debt... Valeri also acknowledged the weakening of the U.S. economy. In what has
been a mixed earnings season, several U.S. companies have indicated
they are suffering from the global economic slowdown.

The international business editor at The Telegraph echoes these sentiments:

Europe is “sleepwalking towards disaster”, according to the 17 experts, who
warned that over the past few weeks “the situation in the debtor countries
has deteriorated dramatically... This dramatic situation is the result of a eurozone system which, as
currently constructed, is thoroughly broken. The cause is a systemic
failure."

In a veiled rebuke to hard-line politicians in Germany, the economists said
the root cause of the crisis has been the boom-bust effect of rampant
capital flows over the past decade – not delinquent behaviour by feckless
nations... they said the current course had become hopeless. Deepening recession is
“tearing at the social fabric of the deficit states”.
The lack of any light at the end of the tunnel is leading to a populist
backlash in both the debtor and creditor states.

Mr Roubini, the New York University professor dubbed "Dr Doom", said a number
of unpleasant factors would combine to derail the global economy in 2013,
including an escalation of the eurozone crisis.

Other factors included further tax increases and spending cuts in the US that
may drive the world's largest economy into recession; a hard landing for
China's economy; a further slowdown in emerging markets; and war with Iran.

"Next year is the time when the can becomes too big to kick it down [the
road]...then we have a global perfect storm," he told Reuters.

Economic and market predictions are a dime a dozen, but I do credit Roubini's comments for getting me out of the equity markets before the crash of 2007, so I am paying some heed to his words.

Warren Buffett famously has said that he became rich by being fearful when others were greedy and greedy when others are fearful. That sounds logical, but it's a challenging philosophy for the average person to follow in real life.

27 July 2012

TIL, upon the advent of wood [400mya], it took fungi 50mil yrs to evolve a way to decompose it. Until then, wood just piled up, never to decay. It is this single fact that led to the Carboniferous period [BBC doc.]

That was the first time I had ever heard of this, so I browsed through the BBC video above (it's good, with excellent production values). The Carboniferous is discussed briefly at about the 28 minute mark, but not in detail.

I found those sentences to be absolutely stunning, and couldn't get out of my mind the image of a never-decaying forest. I should mention here that one of my "hobbies" for years has been clearing underbrush in woodland in northern Minnesota. I can't conceive of the tangled mess that would accumulate if no fallen wood decayed for even a thousand years. Then extend that to millions of years...

And think of the fire hazard. Nobody in Colorado or California needs to be reminded of the risk of accumulated deadwood. Plus, the atmosphere in the Carboniferous had high levels of oxygen (in part because that wood was not decaying).

Today, a geology student added to the Reddit thread some confirming and explanatory notes:

1) This period of elevated oxygen levels (30-35%, versus the 21% of
today) lasted from the Carboniferous through the end of the Cretaceous,
65M years ago. It is extremely likely that the large-type dinosaurs
simply cannot exist in our current atmosphere. They probably needed
these increased oxygen levels to reach the energy production density
that these massive creatures are estimated to require.

2) It is because of A) These elevated oxygen levels, and B) the lack
of a fungi capable of breaking down lignin, the structural molecule of
plant material, that forest growth back in the day was completely
rampant. A very large amount of the solid biomass preserved in the
entire fossil record came from this one 65-ish million year timespan.

3) Nearly all of the coal beds we exploit today came from the
Carboniferous and the other periods with elevated oxygen levels. Guess
what? Most of the coal has been judged to have been originally deposited
as charcoal. Here's the kicker. Most of the solid biomass from the time
period is believed to have lived in wet marshes/semi-permanently
raining rainforests. Coal beds from the same (originally rainforest) bed
formations have been found on continents separated by entire oceans.
Some of these beds have been hundreds of meters thick. These factors
imply that global-scale firestorms were a very common occurrence during
the Carboniferous, and that these fires occurred in very wet conditions
that would be simply impossible during the modern day. This and the lack
of a fungal decay mechanism (also, charcoal basically cannot be broken
down by fungi even today) is why so very much coal comes from the
Carboniferous.

4) This here is the cool piece of information. The Cretaceous ends,
geologically, at something called the K-T boundary, which is the
few-millimeter thick layer of space dust that marks the Yucatan
Peninsula impact. As most of you know, a rare platinum group element,
iridium, is found in this thin layer (Iridium is only found in decent
amounts in asteroids...). But, recently, investigators have found that a
very large amount of soot is also in this layer, to the tune of several
weight %. One investigator did some simple projections and calculated
that the deposition of this amount of soot worldwide would imply that
25% of the entire biomass of the planet Earth burned after the meteor
strike. The asteroid has been found to have caused a global firestorm, a
holocaust in the truest sense of the world - one that would not have
been possible were it not for the elevated oxygen levels.

There's more at the link.

In this blog I do try to be tolerant of different viewpoints, especially religion-based ones. I will sometimes express incredulity or speak out against intolerance, but I do try not to mock - except for "young-earthers." And when I post something like this, I actually have to kind of feel sorry for them - that their worldview cuts them off from some of the most magnificient and spectacular concepts that the mind can encompass. I'm going to be thinking about the Carboniferous and Cretaceous forests and firestorms for a long time.

A 13-meter (40-foot) log was dug up in Cambodia. Thousands of people have flocked to see it. And...

"They believe the log has magical powers," he said, adding that
visitors were coming loaded with offerings such as pig heads and boiled
whole chickens after some locals who touched the wood won money in the
lottery.

"At least one hundred people a day visit the log to ask for lottery
numbers and to cure their illnesses," he said. "They believe in
superstition."..

Hun Nov said some believers rubbed talcum powder onto the wood, hoping to see
lucky lottery numbers, and others drank water from the pond and smeared
nearby mud onto their bodies in a bid to cure their ailments.

26 July 2012

How old are the hoses that connect your clothes washing machine to
hot and cold water? It is a question I had not thought about until
reading a column in my favorite home-improvement blog:

Burst washing machine hoses have to be one of the most common causes of catastrophic water damage in homes. When I find rubber hoses used to
connect the washing machine, I often mention to my clients that it's a
good idea to replace them...

Every time a washing machine shuts off the water, a shockwave is sent through the water pipes... As rubber ages, it loses its flexibility. After being subjected to
water hammer over and over for many years, the rubber washing machine
hose is eventually going to fail, and it's going to be one heck of a
mess...

I've heard that a good rule of thumb is to replace rubber washing
machine hoses every five years. That sounds good, but how do you
remember? Another tip I've heard is to replace your washing machine
hoses every leap year. Not a bad idea.

After reading that, I realized that the hoses to our washer are twelve years old. I shuddered to realize what would have happened had a hose burst when we were out of the house. It would be the equivalent of taking a garden hose and leaving it on in the house.

There is an emergency toggle switch (back right in my photo above) that can be used in an emergency - if you're at home. It's not a bad idea to shut this off when you go away on a trip. As the link indicates, the washing machine manuals say to shut off the water supply whenever you're not using the washer. Nobody ever does that.

At the link are other recommendations re automatic-sensing shutoff kits and using stainless-steel flexible hoses.

If you can connect a garden hose to a faucet, you can replace your
washing machine hoses. Just use a wrench to loosen the old hoses, and
give the new hoses an extra 1/4 turn with a wrench after you have them
hand-tightened.

In the US alone, the biggest market and the biggest supplier, an
estimated two million products derived from human tissue are sold each
year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.

It is an industry that promotes treatments and products that
literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and the
lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee
repairs). It's also an industry fuelled by powerful appetites for
bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies...

In contrast to tightly monitored systems for tracking intact organs such
as hearts and lungs, authorities in the US and many other countries
have no way to accurately trace where recycled skin and other tissues
come from and where they go...

The Slovaks export cadaver parts to the Germans; the Germans export
finished products to South Korea and the US; the South Koreans to
Mexico; the US to more than 30 countries. Distributors of manufactured products can be found in the
European Union, China, Canada, Thailand, India, South Africa, Brazil,
Australia and New Zealand. Some are subsidiaries of multinational
medical corporations.

The international nature of the industry, critics claim,
makes it easy to move products from place to place without much
scrutiny.

“If I buy something from Rwanda, then put a Belgian label on
it, I can import it into the US. When you enter into the official
system, everyone is so trusting,” said Dr Martin Zizi, professor of
neurophysiology at the Free University of Brussels. Once a product is in the European Union, it can be shipped to the US with few questions asked.

“They assume you've done the quality check," Zizi said. "We are more careful with fruit and vegetables than with body parts.”..

Because of the ban on selling the tissue itself, the US companies
that first commercialised the trade adopted the same methods as the
blood collection business.

The for-profit companies set up non-profit offshoots to
collect the tissue — in much the same way the Red Cross collects blood
that is later turned into products by commercial entities.

Nobody charges for the tissue itself, which under normal
circumstances is freely donated by the dead (via donor registries) or by
their families.

Rather, tissue banks and other organisations involved in the
process receive ill-defined “reasonable payments” to compensate them for
obtaining and handling the tissue.

That's one reason some people argue that you shouldn't sign your organ donor card; your body parts are sufficiently valuable that if you die in a hospital, representatives may negotiate with your loved ones to reduce or eliminate your hospital bill in exchange for harvesting your tissue; if your consent is pre-signed, they may not make such offers. I don't know whether such arguments are valid; it may be country-dependent.

Other articles (here, here) in the series detail the morbid and often unethical methodology used in tissue procurement:

“On the way to the cemetery, when we were in the
hearse, one of his feet — we noticed that one of the shoes slipped off
his foot, which seemed to be hanging loose,” his mother, Lubov Frolova,
told ICIJ.

“When my daughter-in-law touched it, she said that his foot was empty.”

Later, the police showed her a list of what had been taken from her son’s body.

“Two ribs, two Achilles heels, two elbows, two
eardrums, two teeth, and so on. I couldn’t read it till the end, as I
felt sick. I couldn’t read it,” she said...“ I was in shock,” Rahulina said. She never signed the papers, she said,
and it was clear to her that someone had forged her approval.

The data in this video may be soft, but there certainly is evidence that some drivers purposely swerve out of their lane in order to kill animals.

When I lived in Texas and drove to Oklahoma for rockhounding trips, I remember swerving on rural roads to avoid tarantulas. I guess I can understand locals wanting to eliminate them. But turtles??? Can someone explain?

Addendum: Larry has reminded me about post turtles. Question for readers in Texas - are they real, or apocryphal?

- before tackling today's subject matter, which is Bastoy Prison Island, as described by Der Spiegel:

No bars. No walls. No armed guards. The prison island of Bastøy in Norway is filled with some of the country's most hardened criminals. Yet it emphasizes self-control instead of the strictly regulated regimens common in most prisons...

The inmates on Bastøy have been convicted of crimes such as murder,
robbery, drug dealing, fraud, violent crime and petty theft. "We don't
pick out the mild cases," says Nilsen. Some inmates serve their entire
sentences on the island. Murderers can only apply to be transferred to
the island once they have served two-thirds of their sentences
elsewhere. Some 115 prisoners live on Bastøy, and those who wish to stay
are required to work and integrate into the community. Anyone caught
drinking alcohol or fighting is thrown out...

During the group meal, which is served once day, the inmates in the room
include a man with an iPod, who stole two paintings by Edvard Munch
from a museum, "The Scream" and "Madonna." There is also the boy with
dreadlocks, who raped two women...

This paradise has been around for 20 years -- and has a warden who
loves statistics. The numbers, after all, prove him right. Only 16
percent of the prisoners in this island jail become repeat offenders in
the first two years after leaving Bastøy as compared with 20 percent for
Norway as a whole. In Germany, where recidivism is measured after three
years, the rate is 50 percent.

The warden also feels vindicated because there has never been a
murder or a suicide on the island -- and because no one left Bastøy last
winter even though the sea ice was frozen solid...

His neat room is furnished with a desk and a bed covered with
flowered sheets, and there are colorful curtains in front of the window,
like in all the rooms. But there are no family photos on Hanssen's
walls, and there are no men's magazines on the nightstand, just books.
Hanssen is studying history and philosophy at the University of Oslo. He
takes his exams on the Internet.

Hanssen is permitted to pursue a degree while on Bastøy, but he also
has to contribute to the community. Every day, he sweeps and mops the
floors of the group house and dusts the shelves. Then he returns to his
room...

Locking people up doesn't do any good, he is convinced, because you
can't lock people up forever in a liberal democracy. Reintegration is
the important part, not punishment, he believes.

25 July 2012

Arthur's Seat is a peak in Edinburgh, Scotland, on whose summit is an ancient hill fort. In 1836, five boys hunting rabbits found
seventeen miniature coffins, described as follows by a report in the London Times:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’
burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat.
In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which
they pulled out.

Little cave. Seventeen tiny coffins. Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed
differently in both style and material. There were two tiers of eight
coffins each, and a third one begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:
That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and
at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite
decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the
effects of age had not advanced to far. And the top coffin was quite
recent looking.

Fewer than half of them survived; the Scotsman, in the first
known published account (16 July 1836), explained that “a number were
destroyed by the boys pelting them at each other as unmeaning and
contemptible trifles.”..

Several potential explanations were advanced – the most popular were
that the burials were part of some spellwork, and the work of witches,
or that they represented mimic burials, perhaps for sailors lost at sea...

It is certainly credible that the decayed coffins were actually those
that occupied the lower tier in the burial nook, and so were most
exposed to water damage. If that’s the case, there is no need to assume
that the burials stretched over many years. This matters, because the only comprehensive study yet made of the
“fairy coffins” strongly indicates that all postdate 1800 and that the
odds favour a deposit or deposits made after about 1830 – within about
five years, in other words, of the discovery of the cache...

As to who precisely did the carving, Simpson and Menefee point out that
“the most striking visual feature of the coffins is the use of applied
pieces of tinned iron as decoration.” Analysis of this metal suggests
that it is very similar to the sort of tin used in contemporary shoe
buckles, and this in turn opens the possibility that the coffins were
the work of shoemakers or leatherworkers, who would have had the manual
skills to make the coffins, but would have lacked the specialist
carpentry tools needed to make a neater job of it.

Caleb Medley was shot in the face during the Aurora tragedy. He is currently in an induced coma in an intensive care, having lost his right eye and suffered brain damage.
His wife has just given birth to their first child one floor away.

Like a number of people injured in the Aurora shooting, he is uninsured.
His family has been told that the cost of his medical treatment may
exceed $2 million.

Not a relationship that is a priori obvious, but here are excerpts from a New York Times article:

We're now in the midst of the nation’s most widespread drought in 60
years, stretching across 29 states and threatening farmers, their crops
and livestock. But there is another risk as water becomes more scarce.
Power plants may be forced to shut down, and oil and gas production may
be threatened.

Our energy system depends on water. About half of the nation’s water
withdrawals every day are just for cooling power plants. In addition,
the oil and gas industries use tens of millions of gallons a day,
injecting water into aging oil fields to improve production, and to free
natural gas in shale formations through hydraulic fracturing. Those
numbers are not large from a national perspective, but they can be
significant locally.

All told, we withdraw more water for the energy sector than for
agriculture. Unfortunately, this relationship means that water problems
become energy problems that are serious enough to warrant high-level
attention.

The map comes from The Drought Monitor; I've embedded a static image, but the one at the source is interactive and allows you to zoom to regional, state, and local conditions.

The study, published in the latest issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, marks the first successful effort to unveil the genetic make-up of a shrunken head...

For the study, she and her colleagues used DNA testing and other
techniques to examine the authenticity and possible cultural provenance
of a shrunken head displayed at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. The
head remains in an incredible state of preservation, with the deceased
man's hair, facial features and other physical characteristics intact.

Many shrunken heads are forgeries, with some 80 percent suspected to be
fakes. The late 19th through the 20th centuries saw a rise in
manufacture of such fakes for profit...

"The shrunken head we studied was made from a real human skin,"
Kahila Bar-Gal said. "The people who made it knew exactly how to peel
the skin from the skull, including the hair," she added, mentioning that
it was also salted and boiled.

The researchers determined that the skin belonged to a man who lived
and died in South America "probably in the Afro-Ecuadorian population."
The genes reveal the victim's ancestors were from West Africa, but his
DNA profile matches that of modern populations from Ecuador with African
admixture.

President Barack Obama's health care overhaul
will shrink rather than increase the nation's huge federal deficits
over the next decade, Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeepers said
Tuesday, supporting Obama's contention in a major election-year dispute
with Republicans.

About 3 million fewer uninsured people will gain health coverage because
of last month's Supreme Court ruling granting states more leeway, and
that will cut the federal costs by $84 billion, the Congressional Budget
Office said in the biggest changes from earlier estimates.

Republicans have insisted that "Obamacare" will actually raise deficits —
by "trillions," according to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But
that's not so, the budget office said...

At the time it was approved in 2010, CBO estimated the law would reduce
the deficit by $143 billion from 2010 to 2019. And CBO estimated that
last year's Republican repeal legislation would increase deficits by
$210 billion from 2010 to 2021.

That may sound like a lot of money, but it's actually a hair-thin margin
at a time when federal deficits are expected to average around $1
trillion a year for the foreseeable future.

The Sushruta Samhita recommends pouring clarified butter into
the infected wound and then drinking it; Pliny the Elder suggests a
linen tourniquet soaked with the menstrual fluid of a dog.

From a review of Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

Wasik is an editor at Wired and Murphy, his wife, a veterinarian. Together they have coauthored a sprawling chronicle of rabies ... It’s a rare pleasure to read a nonfiction book by authors who research
like academics but write like journalists. They have mined centuries’
worth of primary sources and come bearing only the gems.

I've requested the book from the library (3 copies, 25 waiting - so it will be a while...)

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom was that life might be unique on earth because there was probably no water in "outer space." That paradigm sure has changed, as explained at Fast Company:

Researchers found [an amount] of water so large that it could provide each
person on Earth an entire planet’s worth of water--20,000 times over...

The
water is in a cloud around a huge black hole... and the waves of energy the black hole releases make
water by literally knocking hydrogen and oxygen atoms together.

That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is... The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water...

...a distance of 12 billion light years. That means they were also looking
back in time 12 billion years*, to when the universe itself was just 1.6
billion years old. They were watching water being formed at the very
start of the known universe, which is to say, water was one of the first
substances formed, created in galactic volumes from the earliest time.

One has to tread carefully when presenting information that can be interpreted as critical of "civil servants," be they policemen, public school teachers, or, as in this case, firemen. With that in mind, I'll note at the start that the embedded graph is deceptive, because the vertical scale has been truncated. The trend certainly is valid, but the implied amplitude has been exaggerated. Now, on to the text, excerpted from Marginal Revolution, via The Dish:

Taxpayers are unlikely to support budget increases for fire departments
if they see firemen lolling about the firehouse. So cities have created new, highly visible jobs for their firemen. The Wall Street Journal
reported recently, “In Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, for example, 90%
of the emergency calls to firehouses are to accompany ambulances to the
scene of auto accidents and other medical emergencies. Elsewhere, to
keep their employees busy, fire departments have expanded into
neighborhood beautification, gang intervention, substitute-teaching and
other downtime pursuits.” In the Illinois township where I live, the
fire department drives its trucks to accompany all medical emergency
vehicles, then directs traffic around the ambulance—a task which,
however valuable, seemingly does not require a hook-and-ladder.

Moreover, most of the time the call is not for a fire but for a minor
medical problem. In many cities, both fire trucks and ambulances respond
to the same calls. The paramedics do a great job but it is hard to
believe that this is an efficient way to deliver medical care and
transportation.

I can vouch for the type of incident described, because at the senior living complex where my mother previously resided, both an ambulance and a fire truck responded to all non-fire emergencies. I never understood the justification for this duplication.

Deep-sea explorers have pulled up 48 tons of silver treasure from
three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic in what may be the
deepest, largest precious metal recovery in history.

The haul was retrieved from the S.S. Gairsoppa, a 412-foot steel-hulled British cargo ship that sank in February 1941.

The
expedition, by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a company specializing in
shipwreck exploration, recovered 1,203 bars of silver, totaling 1.4
million ounces...

The marine exploration company is also in the process of exploring another British sunken ship, the S.S. Mantola, which is believed to hold an estimated 600,000 ounces of additional U.K.-insured silver.

The triceratops and man lived closer chronologically than a triceratops and stegosaurus.

Cleopatra lived closer chronologically to the moon landing than to the building of the pyramids.

"John, where James had had "had", had had "had had"; "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher."

What is commonly called "seaweed" is technically not a plant. They are
all forms of algae. This includes larger, more complicated forms like
kelp, which actually has vascular tissue like most terrestrial plants.
To make things more confusing, moss has no vascular tissue, but it is a plant.

The black stripes of a zebra's coat absorb more sunlight and get warmer
than their white counterparts. This causes the heat to rise off the
black stripes and cold air falls on the white stripes, causing
circulation over the zebra, allowing it to stay cool in the direct
sunlight.

23 July 2012

It's not really an a capella performance, of course. These are the vocal tracks isolated from the instrumentals. Depending on your enthusiasm for the piece, your brain may be able to fill in the silences with the appropriate music.

But the quality of the vocals by themselves is really rather impressive.

I didn't understand the photo above, posted at the butterfly forum where Wisconsin enthusiasts report their observations. It was labeled as "tiger beetle larva" - an incidental finding during a North American Butterfly Association field trip. The photo obviously has some motion artifact - but what is it?

A keyword search yielded this image -

- at Beetles In The Bush ("A Prairie Tiger Beetle larva peers up from its burrow in rocky soil of a
dolomite glade in the White River Hills of southwestern Missouri. The
head of this 3rd-instar larvae is about the size of a pencil eraser.") The larva uses its blunt head to block its burrow and then waits for prey like an antlion at the bottom of a sand cone. The very interesting link also offered a more comprehensible side view -

- along with instructions on how to extract the larva from its burrow (not an easy task, because those little hooks on its lower dorsum hold it firmly in the burrow, and it can retreat a substantial distance (inches/feet) when threatened or annoyed.)

"Does something that would limit magazines that could carry 100
rounds, would that infringe on the constitutional right?" host Chris
Wallace asked [Senator Ron] Johnson [R-Wisc] on "Fox News Sunday."

"I believe so," Johnson replied. "People will talk about unusually
lethal weapons, that could be potentially a discussion you could have.
But the fact of the matter is there are 30-round magazines that are just
common all over the place. You simply can't keep these weapons out of
the hands of sick, demented individuals who want to do harm. And when
you try and do it, you restrict our freedom."

I come from a family that has used guns for hunting (pheasants and deer), so I'm not anti-gun per se. But I frankly do not understand the mindset expressed here. Perhaps some clear-headed, well-reasoning reader of this blog can offer an explanation.

It was early October 2011, and I was on the treadmill checking email
from my phone when I noticed several hundred new messages had arrived
since I last looked at my Gmail inbox just 20 minutes
earlier. I didn’t know it at the time, but my account was being used to
beta test a private service now offered openly in the criminal
underground that can be hired to create highly disruptive floods of junk
email, text messages and phone calls.

Many businesses request some kind of confirmation from their bank
whenever high-dollar transfers are initiated. These confirmations may be
sent via text message or email, or the business may ask their bank to
call them to verify requested transfers. The attack that hit my inbox
was part of an offering that crooks can hire to flood each medium of
communication, thereby preventing a targeted business from ever
receiving or finding alerts from their bank...

If you run a small business and one day find yourself on the receiving
end of one of these email, SMS and/or phone floods, I’d advise you to
find a mobile phone that isn’t being blocked and alert your financial
institution to be especially vigilant for suspicious transactions.

22 July 2012

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth…

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say “come dance with me”
And murmured vague obscenities
It isn’t all it seems at seventeen…

We all play the game, and when we dare
We cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say: “Come on, dance with me”
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me, at seventeen.

Her most successful single was "At Seventeen," released in 1975, a bittersweet commentary on adolescent cruelty and teenage angst, as reflected upon from the maturity of adulthood. "At Seventeen" was a smash, receiving tremendous acclaim from critics and record buyers alike — it charted at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart. It even won the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance - Female beating out the likes of Linda Ronstadt who was nominated for the classic Heart Like A Wheel album, Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy. Ian performed "At Seventeen" as a musical guest on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975... Another measure of her success is anecdotal - on Valentine's Day 1977, Ian received 461 Valentine cards, having indicated in the lyrics to "At Seventeen" that she never received any as a teenager."

This brassiere has been featured on many websites this week, but it wasn't until I got to Spiegel Online that I found the associated* panties:

"Up to now, there was nothing to indicate the existence of bras with
clearly visible cups before the 19th century," writes Beatrix Nutz, a
university archaeologist. But now the university is proudly displaying
four bras with "distinctly cut cups" dating back to the 15th century.

The bras come from a trove of 2,700 individual textile fragments
found during archaeological investigations of Lengberg Castle, in the
country's East Tyrol region, as part of an extensive reconstruction that
began on the building in 2008. Although the garments were first found
that year, the discovery was only announced this month.

The bras themselves were reportedly found in a "vault filled with
waste" that was perhaps put there when a documented 15th-century
addition was made to the castle. Two of them, which are highly
fragmented, are described as "a combination of a bra and a shirt," with
no sleeves but with lace stitches below to provide extra support. The
third, which is elaborately decorated, "looks a lot more like modern
bras" given that it has shoulder straps and indications of a back strap.
The fourth "resembles a modern bra the most," with its cups "made from
two pieces of linen sewn together vertically."

Other finds in the same vault included linen shirts with pleated
collars, a pair of completely preserved linen underpants, and a codpiece
for a pair of trousers.

*Addendum: "associated" by location but not by wearer. See the link provided by Stella in the Comments which indicates that the lower garment was for a male.

From an article in The Guardian, not really "news" per se, but some startling numbers:

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules
to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore... for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that
has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than
enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world...

...almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was
opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s,
and Nigeria £196bn...

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities
is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically
underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's
calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001%
of the world's population...

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much
worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying
on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people...."

For hundreds of years, a mystery surrounded the cathedral of Venzone, a small city in the province of Udine, Italy. Instead of decomposing normally, bodies buried in the tombs beneath the cathedral were perfectly preserved and still recognizable decades later, a fact which led the townspeople to periodically retrieve and commune with their dead loved ones. In modern times, scientists finally traced the source of this wonder to Hypha tombicina, a microscopic, parasitic fungus that rapidly dehydrates the bodies before decomposition can even begin.

That's the explanation at Wondercabinet, repeated at several other sites in my brief search. Personally I find it hard to understand how a fungus can dehydrate a corpse; I prefer this explanation at Virtual Tourist:

They were already found in 1647 during works in the cathedral. Venzone lies atop limestone bedrock. Groundwater in such regions is
usually alkaline, an environment hostile to putrefaction. During floods,
alkaline waters likely seeped through dirt floors in tombs 1 to 10,
preserving the cadavers. Vaults 11 to 17 had sealed stone floors.
Moreover, floodwaters in tombs 1 to 10 drained quickly through the
porous limestone. Coffin wood from those vaults possessed just 7 percent
water. In such aridity, water-soaked humans would have dried rapidly
into mummies.

Venzone is not at high altitude, but desiccation as a preservative would accord nicely with the cloud mummies of the Andes and some that I seem to remember from Artic locales.

What's most intersting to me is not the mummification per se, but the respect accorded to the mummies by local villagers. Some of the photos seem to be from a museum, so part of this may be tourist-income-related, but the respect predates that.

Incidentally, for those interested, Virtual Tourist got its information from a web page entitled "The Mystery of Holy Incorruption" which offers modern interpretations of the "mysterious preservation of saints' bodies." That looks blogworthy on its own - bookmarked for the future (sigh...).

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an
advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability
to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside.
Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.

"These results open the potential for visibly
transparent polymer solar cells as add-on components of portable
electronics, smart windows and building-integrated photovoltaics and in
other applications..."

Very cool. It's developments like this - not more drilling - that can most effectively and permanently decrease dependence on foreign oil.

20 July 2012

For the past few weeks my blogging has slowed down because my computer has slowed down. It's gotten to the point now where it's frankly unpleasant to surf the 'net looking for material. I will probably have to take some time off to get this figured out.

I search for blogworthy material using tabbed browsing on Firefox (14.0.1) on an iMac (2 GHz processor, 1 GB memory, running OSX 10.6.8). When I turned it on this morning, I looked at the Activity Monitor utility and found the numbers embedded at top. I don't know if there's anything ominous there, but I do know that as soon as I turn on Firefox and open just one tab, the free System Memory drops from 300+ MB to about 100MB:

And after checking my mail I then open my first set of 12 tabs to check the news of the day, and...

... the memory plunges to 10-20 MB. I've noticed some sites that seem to slow things down more than most (Salon being the biggest offender for me), but by the time I'm able to get through about eight of the tabs, Firefox is using about 750 MB of memory and is "not responding." If I go to breakfast and let the iMac sleep, the situation improves...

... but that's only temporary, and pretty soon I'm once again waiting for pages to load or scroll.

I suppose I could have acquired malware somenhow, because I do wander the fringes of the 'net looking for material, but my basic antivirus program hasn't detected anything. I never used to have problems (visiting the same sites 12 at a time), and I think this has developed after upgrading to Firefox 13 and then 14. It seems to not "let go" of RAM after I close tabs. Or perhaps there are some caches somewhere that are full that I don't know about?

It may be that I need to get some new apps to clean up my rather old iMac. Perhaps I should download OnyX or something equivalent. I'm dreading digging through my system files, but I'll need to do something to get back on track. Fortunately I do have some time this weekend, as my invitation to play in The (British) Open seems to have been lost in the mail. And perhaps I'll use this downtime to do some selling on eBay.

If I don't get this solved this weekend, what I'll probably do is go full "retro" and start posting some of the thousands of bookmarks I've saved over the years but never used, or transcribe some material from magazines like Smithsonian, Harper's, and The Atlantic.

I'm open to suggestions, but wanted to post this for now to let people know the reason for my current absence from the blogosphere.

19 July 2012

I've just finished reading Forgotten Fatherland, and was surprised to encounter the following passage about Friedrich Nietzsche's views on racial (im)purity:

There is no racial type in Paraguay, no 'pure' races except a few thousand Indians in the remote north and west, quickly being wiped out and their forest felled. With at least twenty Indian women apiece, gifts usually from the local Indian caciques, the conquistadors had mixed their Spanish blood so fast that Paraguay was not a hundred years old before a mestizo race was a fact. One enlightened governor even encouraged the races to mix, but it wasn't really necessary. Like ink in a bucket, the Spanish blood rippled outwards from the capital, sometimes through marriage to noble Indian women, but more often through rape and concubinage. Other immigrants added their genes to the cocktail - European adventurers, negroes and the mamelucos, fierce Portuguese-speaking land-pirates from Sao Paulo, part-Indian, part-negro, who descended on the Jesuit missions and carried off the Indian neophytes as slaves.

Nietzsche had applauded mixed races, using the Greeks as his example; he thought they produced the hardiest, most productive artists and minds. The racial distinctions in Europe he wanted to subsume into the model of the 'good European'; though he spoke of a master race, he did not have a specific race in mind and certainly not the German. He envisaged a group of individuals displaying masterful qualities, not a race as we would recognise it, for it is clear that his ideal men can arise in any race at any time: no one race is supreme. For all his championing of the 'prowling blond beast', the creature of conquest, he would have found in the hardy mestizo culture something admirable and enduring.

My limited knowledge of Nietzsche (from collegiate reading lists decades ago) would not have predicted that paragraph; I guess I've been misled by popular culture linking him with the National Socialists in later years.

And I certainly would never have predicted him using Greece as an example of mixed race culture. I know that all nations and cultures are ultimately melting-pots, but Greece would not have popped to mind as the prototype of such. Is it? Or was it in his day, moreso than other European nations?

18 July 2012

The West Midlands city of Coventry was a prosperous town during the Middle Ages, a major center of the textile trade, and by the 14th century the fourth largest city in England. It had two churches, the 12th century cathedral in St. Mary’s Priory, which was destroyed in Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and St. Michael’s, a 14th century Gothic church that was the largest parish church in the country. The guilds saw to it that St. Michael’s was packed with top quality stained glass...

In 1939, with World War II looming on the horizon, the stained glass panels were removed from the cathedral windows as a precaution to prevent their destruction in any German bombing raids. Coventry was replete with industrial targets both civil and military, so there was little doubt that it would see action. The glass was packed into 30 crates and stored in the cellar of the rectory in the small village of Hampton Lucy...

Coventry Cathedral suffered multiple direct hits. Firefighters were able to put out the first fire of the evening, but as the bombing progressed that night, the fires became impossible to contain. By the time the all-clear sirens rang the next morning, there was nothing left of Coventry Cathedral but smoldering ruins. A few walls and the tall spire were all that remained. Those ruins are still on the spot. A new cathedral was built in Modernist style right next to it, with the ruins as a consecrated garden space dedicated to peace and reflection...

Thanks to a joint fundraising project by World Monuments Fund Britain and Coventry Cathedral that raised £250,000 ($388,000), conservators will begin work on the medieval stained glass of Coventry Cathedral this summer...

Digital imaging software will be required to reconstruct window images, because the panes were removed and stored without annotations of their original placement. More details at The History Blog.

I found the image at a fantastic site for those of you interested in art or in the medieval era - Vidimus "the only on-line magazine devoted to medieval stained glass." Their extensive discussion of the Coventry stained glass restoration is in Issue 33.

For other interesting material, just click on their "back issues" and then "feature." Enjoy.

That's not quite accurate - he actually was CEO of the merged companies for only 20 minutes:

Pressure is building on Duke Energy Corp.to explain the abrupt departure of Bill Johnson as chief executive this week, as former Progress Energy board members break their silence and express outrage at what they term a calculated deception.

At the same time, the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which last week approved the merger between Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke and Raleigh, N.C., Progress with the understanding that Johnson would be Duke's CEO, is deliberating whether to investigate Duke officials over possible false statements about their intentions.

For less than a day's work, Johnson is entitled to a hefty exit package that could amount to about $44 million, according to a securities filing...

Details emerged Thursday revealing that Johnson was asked to resign Monday afternoon, shortly after the merger closed that day at 4:02 p.m., suggesting to some that his ouster was choreographed in advance. The merger had received final approval from South Carolina regulators earlier Monday.
Johnson signed his employment contract with Duke on June 27, days before the merger closed.

He was CEO of the combined company for about 20 minutes, Mullin said. After the merger closed, Duke's board went into executive session and voted to request Johnson's resignation, Mullin wrote.

Squid rapidly change colour when the muscles surrounding a
chromatophore-filled sac contracts and expands -- when it
contracts, the pigment appears denser, when it expands the colour
becomes muted and disappears. The squid changes its colour
according to exterior factors -- such as a threat or the presence
of a potential mate - because each chromatophore is linked to a
nerve ending.

Via Wired and Neatorama. The background version of Pachelbel seems rather plodding, but the visual images are interesting.

In this heart-breaking photo, an adult dolphin is seen carrying the body
of its dead baby on its back. The scene was witnessed by tourists
during a boat tour in the sea near Qinzhou in southern China's Guangxi
Province. Wang Bin, who took the photo, said that during the three
minutes they watched, the baby slid from its mother's back several times
but each time the mother would dive again to pick up her baby and keep
going. Picture: Quirky China News / Rex Features

The lesion on the baby's abdomen looks to me like a wound from a boat propellor.

A story at the Wall Street Journal reports that a bumper crop of lobsters has caused the wholesale price to plunge:

Harbors up and down the coast of Maine are filled with idle fishing
boats, as lobster haulers decide that pulling in their lobster pots has
become a fruitless pursuit.

Prices at the dock have fallen to as low
as $1.25 a pound in some areas—roughly 70% below normal and a nearly
30-year-low for this time of year, according to fishermen, researchers
and officials. The reason: an unseasonably warm winter created a supply
glut throughout the Atlantic lobster fishery.

Those prices have officials and lobstermen concerned about the fate
of one of the state's most vital industries. "For some people it will be
disaster, they are going to go bankrupt," said Bob Bayer, director of
the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.

Retail lobster prices in Maine have
started to fall along with the glut, and Mr. Bayer said that some
fishermen have begun selling lobsters out of their trucks for as low as
$4 a pound. But consumers elsewhere in the U.S. aren't likely to see
bargains. The Maine lobsters that currently are in season can't be
shipped long distances due to their soft shells, and retailers have
other fixed costs that limit big price drops.

The story reminds me that many years ago my wife and I have vacationed (twice) at Mount Desert Island in order to hike and bike the trails of Acadia National Park. We prefer to eat "where locals eat" rather than in tourist restaurants, and we discovered a fantastic place for lobster - the West Street Cafe. I think we had the "early bird special" every night for a week. A big lobster and a bucket of butter. We have very pleasant memories of those vacations - especially bicycling the carriage trails.

BTW, according to the story, the reason for the population surge isn't just warmer ocean temperatures. There has also been "overfishing of cod and haddock, their main predators."

p.s. - those of you who live in the area or visit frequently, if you have tips for dining, feel free to leave them in the Comments, in case we ever go back...

17 July 2012

"There is no hair more iconic, perhaps, than Marie Antoinette’s elaborately curled and beribboned wigs. Her daringly avant-garde style and her love of fashion took Versailles by storm, and the ladies of court were constantly trying to emulate the Queen’s frequently changing coiffure... One of the most well known trends of this period was for miniature models of war ships to be placed upon rolling waves of curls, in celebration of French Navy victories against the British."

"With the age of Revolution drawing to a close, in the Directoire period, came the most extraordinarily morbid new fashions; haircuts à la victime were
all the rage for men and women - hair either closely and raggedly
cropped, or cropped at the back with long curls in front, emulating the
style given to those aristocrats unfortunate enough to go to the
guillotine...

Dresses were in the style of underclothes, as this was how one met with
Madame Guillotine - and a red ribbon was worn around the neck, grimly
recalling the manner in which the aristocracy met its end."

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net